


Elf Shot

by Red_Temper



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, M/M, Oberon Enjolras, Post-Break Up, Puck Grantaire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:41:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24765586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red_Temper/pseuds/Red_Temper
Summary: Summer was always a bad season from Grantaire. In it, words thrived but it did not belong to his lord, so all the words came out wrong. They were always built of glass, words of knives, acid eating away at every one. They always fought in summer, so in summer he left.He had always preferred the winter. He’d gone and found it.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Elf Shot

He loved the iron city, though it wasn’t iron all the way through. It was lights and concrete and metal girders, and cold, and rain. But it was iron enough. Enough that the old kind, those that were called fair, rarely feasted there, rarely stole, rarely visited, and if they did – rarely returned. 

He praised himself, honoured himself – for who else would anymore – on being the only one who could stick it out, who could take the rain on his face and the burning of cold metals on the back of his tongue, and the dark, and the exile. 

‘Summer days,’ he’d cackle brokenly, to the dead wood of his bar top, which was still his shelter even if it wasn’t sacrosanct or in a grove, as he poured fairy dust into a mug and turned it to moonshine, ‘for summer sprites.’ His revels-night cocktail whispered, Nemeton, to the wood as though it could still hear – he knew the words, little as they mattered now. His days were long since past.

And if he was to be miserable, so should be the place he chose to rejoice in it. He refused to wallow and if he were to wallow, he would do it with unholy fucking delight. And they could run and take that to the King of Shadows.

He would do it as the only bright being left walking the streets of this city, perhaps the only one who’d ever been there in the first place – this metropolitan heap of rust and gutter rain he’d chosen was disgustingly human – and his king would only hear it as the distant thunder. There would be the defiant shining of a midwinter moon hung in the sky, in the height of his lady’s summer, and his king would know.

This Robin Goodfellow was still alive. No, Grantaire wasn’t dead yet.

*

The rain smelled of spite and tasted maliciously cheerful as he walked. The slick giddiness of it glided across the curve of his lips and on the backs of his teeth. The edges of his smile turned idly smug at it, before he turned his face away and pushed open the café door. 

The resonant hum of hard run machines and faulty electricity stuttered. One foot over the threshold and the heating ratcheted up a couple of degrees; two feet over the threshold and he was standing in the café. The fridge immediately ceased its dogged hum and broke.

The lady at the register gave him a dour look as he approached, but he wasn’t terribly put out by it. Humans.

‘The usual please, Musichetta.’

The milk sitting out for takeaway coffee and teas curdled.

Musichetta narrowed one eye with professional disdain and took up an empty cardboard cup. Musichetta made very good coffee, very bad temperedly, but Grantaire was reasonably sure he must have been her favourite customer since his coffee was always unreasonably good and crafted with an equally unreasonable bad temper. And this was assuming she didn’t even know about the fridge yet.

He uncurdled the milk while her back was turned and told himself it was mostly selfish.

A cloud of chocolate powder went up over the top of his coffee; Musichetta smacked on the lid and deposited some sort of ravaged wafer on top, before sliding it to his side of the counter.

He granted her a beatific smile and reached out to take it.

A warm, band-aid wrapped hand came down on the lid, the moment his fingers wrapped around the cup’s circumference. Robin was impressed with Musichetta’s instincts, which knew better than to let their human touch fairy flesh.

‘Someone was looking for you,’ she said, and then her hand was back on the other side of the counter. 

Grantaire’s smile pulled back to his teeth and then faded. He gave her an old-world nod, the meaning of which meant nothing to her, but Grantaire was nothing if not an old-world fairy and one good turn demanded another.

‘I think your fridge is broken,’ he said, and left. 

*

The rain was prideful now, but there was a sting of bitterness in it that burned at the corners of people’s mouths. Summer breezed into the bar (though to Grantaire, they would always be Jehan, once a friend), one step behind the lady and two times more presumptuous. Summer swelled and blew through the room, slipping around tall curved columns of shining redwood and roof supports that curled and twisted like branches, carved wonders of architecture, and was rebuffed by walls that were blue and shimmered with gems like the stars at night; winter stars. And winter nights. And winter walls. 

Summer days for summer sprites. These walls had heard his brittle laugh too often and borne his cold fire as he’d crafted them. They knew what they were. They knew what he was. They did not betray him now. They could not.

Still between the walls, the air warmed, the lamps lit themselves and glowed cheerfully, spice and wine rose in empty cups, and the distant thunder that haunted his king turned to distant laughter echoing in Grantaire’s ears. 

Summer stopped just short of vaulting the bar top, where neither they nor their lady had even the pretence of welcome. 

‘Neither harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our lovely lady nigh’ whispered Summer in warning, but Grantaire wasn’t theirs to command and the words were not his and he made no such promises.

‘Ill-met by winter’s night, my lady.’

The rain outside was iced scorn. The lady offered a flash of pearled teeth, a deliberate tilt of her pointed and vainglorious chin, the stirring of her gladioli glossed fairy locks, and her familiar wry voice slipped a needle of glass under the soft place beneath his ribs.

‘Careful Robin, you’ll bitter the wine.’ 

The Iron Lily needed no weapons to cleave her chosen battlefields.

‘So, you’re not dead yet.’ 

The lady (Cosette, also once a friend) slid onto a bar stool, a flurry of yellow fireflies twinkling around them at the swish of her skirts. Her fine fingers grasped at a long-stemmed glass and, with a whisper of minted breath, blew the dust from it and filled it with wine. He drew a sphere on the edge of the bar top, just to see if she would let him, and it darkened to the gleaming purple haze of moonshine. 

‘I like your moon,’ she observed, plucking a mushroom from where it had grown through the wood of bar from too much exposure to elf magic.  
He looked her in the eyes for the first time. They were bright and warm as summer suns and gold like treasure. As light as his lord’s were dark, kindled with that same indulgent spark. He lowered his lashes against the glare and then his eyes too. The little glass needle poked a precise hole through the place he’d hidden his restless longing for home, right behind his lungs. He bit his lip to keep it from dripping onto the bar top between them.

The lady swirled a finger over the glass and the moonshine turned back to bloody wine, ‘but I like my moon better.’

Grantaire choked down the longing just to laugh at her and turned the stars with barely a flutter of his lashes. The lady smiled at him still and looked through the ceiling to see them. Like the walls, they glittered above them.

‘Midwinter stars for midsummer nights,’ she sighed languorously, and then said to him, ‘You’re still his sprite, even here. Even if you die here. You’ll still be his.”

Her bare feet swung idly off the ground and her needle drove itself deeper.

‘Are you done lying to yourself yet?’

He turned away. He fought to keep the grimace from his face. The glass thorn was poking holes in his spiteful delight and any moment it might shatter and cut him. He would bleed out on the floor of this forgotten bar in a fairy-less city, bleed out the toxins and the pain, bleed bitterness into a puddle on the floor. Then he would watch her needle slide into that puddle of cultivated pain, pack up, and go back to fairyland. Back to him.

He felt it crack.

With nimble fingers, he reached under his skin; felt the glass, cold and purposeful, and wrenched it free, dropping it slick to the bar top between them. He unstoppered his bottled courage to look her in the eyes once more.

Dark eyes mirrored them in his mind. 

Angry eyes. On both sides. The words that followed, words of glass, words of knives, each broken and shattered and hurled, acid eating away at every one. Summer; of the golden dawns, green hills, and phosphorescent fireflies, forgotten in the throws of heat and rage and malice wrapped lies. Robin…No, Grantaire had always preferred the winter. He’d gone and found it.

Cosette sighed and stood. She brushed two fingers from his temple to his jaw and, with all the revelries of midsummer sounding in his ears, she gave him the last breath of her summer she had with her.

‘I’ve missed you, R.’

His resolve was wobbly most days; it buckled and trembled hearing that. He shored it up using what was left of his pride and filled in the cracks with mortar of resentment towards the longing that had not subsided from his airways. The lady did not stop for mercy.

‘I’ll miss you when I leave. I’ll miss you still when you die, and even after that.’

She paused, long enough for Grantaire to get some relief before the killing blow. She pressed an airy kiss to his cheekbone and grinned when it coloured in response, pulled back and cleaved her battlefield without regret.

‘But not as much as he will.’

*

When the lady was gone, the rain lightened to a drizzle and the stars turned once again towards the summer, but the moon was blue winter. It lit grey soaked streets of electric light and created a silhouette out of the figure passing through the door of a late open coffee shop.

‘The usual please, ‘Chetta.’

The coffeemaker hissed out the order, spat, gurgled and then died.

*

The lady looked up at the moon in the height of her summer and sent a tiny grin to it in the night. There was still time.

Robin Goodfellow – R wasn’t dead yet.


End file.
